by Jane Heller
“Jeremy Cook? The fellow who came over to your house that night and made a nuisance of himself?”
“That’s right.”
“What makes you think he’s the one you’re looking for?”
“You said the devil was hiding in the body of someone I know.”
“Yes, but you’re a real estate agent. You know lots of people.”
“Not as ‘devilish’ as Jeremy. When we graduated from high school, he wasn’t voted the Most Likely to Succeed; Mitchell was. Jeremy was voted the Most Likely to Appear on a ‘Wanted’ Poster. He was always getting into trouble.”
“So?”
“So isn’t he the sort of person the devil would choose to hide in?”
“Possibly.”
“Oh, come on, David. Just tell me the truth: is it Jeremy?”
“I can’t confirm or deny that.”
“It is Jeremy, isn’t it?”
“You don’t give up, do you?”
“Not when my soul is at stake. No.”
David didn’t say anything for several seconds.
“Are you there?” I asked.
“I’m here,” he said.
“Are you going to answer my question? Is Jeremy Cook the one?”
“If I said yes, would that make you believe that I’m willing to sacrifice my own safety to help you? That even though I’m a darksider, I’m a good guy?”
“The answer’s yes,” I said breathlessly, sensing David was caving in.
He hesitated. “Then mine is, too.”
Chapter 15
Now what? I asked myself after hanging up the phone and sinking into the living room sofa. Now that I knew that the devil had taken up residence in the body of Jeremy Cook, what was I supposed to do about it? Drive a stake through Jeremy’s heart? Throw crosses at him? Or Jewish stars? Tie him to a chair and force him to listen to that CD of Benedictine monks performing Gregorian chants? What?
Before I could ponder the subject any further, Pete decided to have one of his periodic bouts of barking. It was odd. Every time I really needed a little peace and quiet to deal with this devil business, the dog had an absolute fit. For no reason. He didn’t appear to want food or water. He didn’t appear to want to be let outside to relieve himself. He didn’t appear to have fleas. He just barked at me. Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof! Nonstop.
“Hey,” I said, reaching out to scratch the white patch on his chest. “I’m trying to think.”
“Woof! Woof! Woof!”
“Look, Pete. I’m not a mind reader,” I said. “Are you lonely for your real owner? Is that it?”
The question only provoked more barking. I was about to put him outside, whether he liked it or not, when he trotted over to the corner of the room. In my rush to call David after coming home from The Hellhole, I had dumped my purse and briefcase onto the floor and left them there in a heap. Now, Pete had his face in the briefcase and appeared to be going through my things. Then he did something truly bizarre: he gripped my MLS book between his teeth, dragged it out of the briefcase, and brought it over to me, like a cat with a mouse in its mouth. He dropped the book on the floor and started poking through the pages with his nose.
“Oh, I get it. You’re in the market for a new house,” I laughed as he riffled through the Multiple Listing Service reference, the realtors’ bible that featured all the properties currently being offered for sale in the county.
I stopped laughing when I saw that Pete had opened the book to a specific page and placed his right front paw on top of it, as if he were marking it. And then he began to bark again. He seemed to be trying to tell me something, trying to show me something.
I got up from the sofa and knelt down beside him. To my amazement, he had opened the book to the exact page where the Nowak house was pictured—the house that had brought David Bettinger into my life!
What in the world was going on? Was it a coincidence that Pete had brought that page to my attention? It had to be. He was probably just playing around, the way dogs often did, and happened to paw that page by accident. Still, it was a pretty funny bit.
“Hey, Pete,” I said. “Maybe you should audition for David Letterman’s Stupid Pet Tricks.”
He stared at me with his soulful hazel eyes, barked a few more times, and then lay down at my feet, licking my shoes.
At least he’s quiet now, I noticed, as I sat back down on the couch and let the events of the evening replay in my mind. It was late by this time—midnight or so—and I was exhausted.
Tomorrow, I decided as my thoughts grew muddled and my lids heavy. Tomorrow I’ll figure out how to confront the devil, Jeremy and all the rest. Now I’m going to sleep.
And, with my trusty canine by my side, I did.
The growling returned on Tuesday morning. Not Pete’s. Mine. I growled during the “Today” show. I growled as I ate breakfast. I growled while I got dressed for work. If David was right, and the growling was the devil’s way of telling me to stop fighting my fate, I was getting the message loud and clear. The problem was, I couldn’t stop fighting my fate. I wasn’t about to be a darksider for the rest of my life. I yearned to be Barbara Chessner again, double chin and all.
As I drove to the office, I decided that if I really wanted to get the devil out of Banyan Beach and out of my life, I’d have to communicate with him somehow. And the only way to do that, I now knew, was through Jeremy Cook. Which meant that I’d have to spend time with Jeremy, a man I loathed, a man who, according to David, didn’t even realize that the devil had taken over his body. I’d have to follow him around, observe him, get to know him, in order to figure out the best way to confront Satan. I couldn’t just walk up to him and say, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” This wasn’t a game, as David had reminded me. This was serious business, a battle between Good and Evil. I had to handle the situation with care, with tact, with subtlety. I’d have to work up to a confrontation, take things slowly, wait for the devil to reveal himself.
I spent the morning showing houses. When I got back to the office, I called my brother and asked him for Jeremy’s phone number.
“Let me get this straight. You want Jeremy’s number?” he asked, stunned by my request. “Jeremy, the guy you can’t stand?”
“Yes,” I said. “I want to ask him something.”
“What did you want to ask him?”
Think of a good one, Barbara. “I had a customer this morning who wanted to know about the fishing in Banyan Beach,” I said. “I told him I’d find out what I could. Since Jeremy’s so knowledgeable about the subject, I thought I’d ask him.”
“I’m sure he’ll be surprised and flattered to hear from you,” said Ben, who gave me Jeremy’s home number as well as the number of the marina where his charter boat was docked.
“Come to think of it, Jeremy’s kind of hard to reach by phone. Why don’t you just go down to the marina and talk to him?” he suggested. “He’s usually back there by four o’clock.”
“Maybe I will, thanks,” I said.
Eddie’s Marina was not frequented by the country-club set. It was a hangout for men whose arms were disproportionately larger than the rest of their body and virtually covered with tattoos. (Think Popeye.) These men didn’t own sleek and sophisticated sailboats; they owned “stinkpots”—big, macho power boats with tuna towers and 750-horsepower engines and serious fishing gear. And speaking of fishing, the place reeked of fish—dead fish and male body odor. Where was potpourri when you needed it?
“Could you please tell me where I can find Jeremy Cook, the captain of Cook’s Charters?” I asked the first man who didn’t leer at me.
“Sure. He’s at ‘C’ dock, slip 14,” he said, pointing to the maze of docks to my left. “But I don’t think he’s come in yet. You wanna talk to his father?”
“His father?”
“Yeah, the old captain. Mike Cook was the original ‘Cook’ in Cook’s Charters,” the man explained. “He fished with Hemingway, ya know.”
“I
s that right?” I said, trying not to look blasé. Unfortunately, every old guy in Florida claims to have fished with Hemingway, the same way that every young girl in Florida claims to have slept with a Kennedy. These men claim to have fished with Hemingway in Key West, in Islamorada, in Bimini, you name it. If all the people who say they fished with Hemingway really did, the man would never have had time to write novels.
“Yup. He can tell some amazin’ stories, old Mike. All ya gotta do is ask him.”
I nodded politely. I didn’t want to sit and listen to fish stories. I wanted to see Jeremy and convince the devil living inside him to leave town.
“Go on,” the man urged. “He’s sittin’ right over there.”
He motioned in the direction of a thin, white-haired man sitting in the folding chair at the foot of the “C” dock, reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette.
“Thanks a lot,” I said, then popped a couple of BreathAssures before walking toward Jeremy’s father. I hoped he could tell me when his son was due back at the marina, as I didn’t plan to camp out there all night.
“Excuse me, Mr. Cook?” I asked when I reached Mike Cook. He was wiry and weathered—seventy-something, I guessed.
“That’s me,” he said, looking up at me with lively green eyes and drawing on his cigarette. “What can I do for you, darlin’?”
“I’m looking for your son,” I said.
“For Jeremy? Now why would a pretty thing like you be lookin’ for an ugly son of a gun like him?” He laughed a congested smoker’s laugh, but it wasn’t at all derisive. It was proud, paternal, full of admiration. It was clear that “ugly son of a gun” was a term of endearment, that he adored Jeremy. The love was there on his face from the moment he mentioned his son’s name. I felt a stab of envy, having never seen that look on the faces of my own parents.
“I wanted to speak to him,” I told Mike Cook.
“Not about a charter, I bet,” he chuckled. “You don’t strike me as a lady who’s done much fishin’.” He was appraising my outfit—a tasteful black sleeveless linen dress, a single strand of pearls, and black patent-leather sandals, the tiny heels of which kept getting caught between the wood planks of the dock.
“I’ve never done any fishing,” I admitted. “I’ve played a little tennis, but no fishing.”
“You oughta try it sometime,” he suggested. “Jeremy’ll take you out in the Hatteras.”
“Thanks anyway, Mr. Cook, but I’m really not a fish person.”
“A fish person? Is that what they call it now?” He threw back his head and laughed.
His laughter was contagious and I began to laugh right along with him. I liked the easiness of this man, the lilting Southern accent, the laconic manner, the warmth. I felt comfortable with him, more so in thirty seconds than I’d felt during a lifetime with my own father.
“You must know my brother,” I said suddenly.
“Your brother? And who might he be?”
“Benjamin Greenberg. I’m Barbara Greenberg Chessner. I was in Jeremy’s class in high school.”
Another grin broke out across Mike Cook’s leathery face. “You’re Benny’s sister?” he said, his voice teasing yet kind.
I nodded.
“Well then, shake my hand, darlin’, and be quick about it.”
He extended his gnarled, arthritic right hand and I shook it enthusiastically. It was odd that we’d never met, I thought, given how close Ben and Jeremy were. On the other hand, my parents would never have socialized with people as low-rent as the Cooks. And they certainly would never have encouraged me to.
“So you’re the one Jeremy fell for back then,” said Mike Cook, running his eyes over me as he took a drag of his cigarette.
“Oh, no,” I protested. “Not me. You must be thinking of one of the other girls we went to school with. Jeremy and I sort of moved in different crowds.” To put it mildly.
Mike shook his head. “Nope. You were the one. My wife remembered.”
“Then you might want to tell her she’s wrong,” I said.
“Can’t,” said Mike. “She’s been dead for over a year.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“’Course you didn’t. Only Jeremy knew.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Cook?”
“Patty never told a soul she was sick. Only Jeremy knew she had cancer without her sayin’ anything. Jeremy’s got a sixth sense about stuff like that.”
Sure he does, I wanted to scream. He’s got the devil living inside him. He can see death coming a mile away.
“Anyhow, Patty used to hear him talk about Barbara this and Barbara that. You damn near broke his heart, huh?”
I stared at Jeremy Cook’s father and wondered if he was senile. Why else would he say that Jeremy had genuinely cared for me and I had broken his heart?
It wasn’t possible. For starters, Jeremy didn’t have a heart to break, not in high school and not now. As I’d said to Suzanne only the night before, he viewed women the same way he viewed fish—as objects of conquest. Once he caught one, he’d throw her back.
For another thing, I had never been anyone’s idea of a heartbreaker in high school, much less Jeremy’s. Back then, I was an uptight princess with unfortunate hair and an even more unfortunate body. I compensated for the boys’ lack of interest in me by telling myself I didn’t have any interest in them either. Not me. I was holding out for Prince Charming or Paul McCartney or whoever came first. As for Jeremy, his taste seemed to run toward sluts—girls with names like Ricki and Tawny and Candy, girls who rebelled against their parents and did whatever they wanted, girls who weren’t holding out for anybody.
Of course, Jeremy had asked me to be his date for the senior prom, but that was only because of my brother, who had felt sorry that I was such a wallflower and pleaded with Jeremy to take me. I had accepted and then pretended to be sick and Jeremy had never forgiven me. That was the way it really was.
No, Mike Cook was mistaken. The “Barbara” Jeremy mentioned to his mother must have been Barbara Delafield. Bobbi Delafield. The girl who graduated from high school and went immediately into a career on the stage—at Titters, the strip joint that was now home to The Hellhole.
While we waited for Jeremy to come in off the Devil-May-Care, Mike Cook talked about fishing. I braced myself for the fabled Hemingway stories, but, mercifully, I was spared. Instead, he told me how he and his wife had started Cook’s Charters in the fifties.
“I loved to fish and was pretty damn good at it,” he recalled without modesty. “So Patty and I decided to make a business of it. We went to the big hotels south of here—Banyan Beach only had the Driftwood Motel in those days—and got a couple of charter concessions. I took the hotel guests out for the day and Patty kept the books. ’Course, the minute Jeremy was old enough to sit up, I taught him to fish like his daddy, startin’ him out in the river and then graduatin’ him to the deep sea stuff. One weekend—I think it was in ’59 when he was two—I took him fishing on the St. Lucie and before the day was over we’d caught over five hundred snook.”
I smiled and nodded, even though I didn’t know a snook from a schnook.
“’Course you couldn’t do that today,” he went on. “Not around here.”
“Why not?” I asked.
He laughed. “You sure aren’t a ‘fish person’ if you don’t know what’s goin’ on,” he said, his tone not accusatory, just surprised. “Well, let me educate you: the reason you couldn’t catch five hundred snook in one day is ’cause there aren’t as many snook in the water as there used to be.”
I was confused. “But doesn’t Jeremy take people fishing every day?”
“He sure does.”
“Well, if there aren’t as many fish in the water, how does he stay in business?”
He laughed again. “You’re mixin’ up two kinds of fishing. Jeremy takes people deep-sea fishing in the Hatteras. In the ocean. He catches tuna and snapper and fish like that. If you’re lookin’ for sn
ook, you gotta go in shallow waters in a shallow draft boat. But you’re not gonna find ’em like before. We used to get out there on the river and be able to see clear to the bottom. There’d be massive schools of snook and mullet feedin’ on the sea grass. Now there’s no sea grass and no fish. Only mud.”
“Mud?” I showed houses along the river practically every day and I hadn’t seen any mud. Of course, I’d never actually looked at the water, really looked at it. It was just there—the “water” in waterfront property. It provided wealthy homeowners with a nice view, was an “amenity” that could be hyped to customers. That was about as much as I knew about it or cared.
“Darlin’, we got ooze where the sea grass used to be and algae where the fish used to be. You gotta go south of here if you’re lookin’ for snook.”
“What killed the fish?” I asked, realizing I sounded like an environmentally challenged person.
“Real estate,” he said matter-of-factly. “The developers started buildin’ houses along the river and the real estate agents were only too happy to sell ’em. Before we knew it, we had pesticides and herbicides, fertilizer and sewage running off into the water. And that’s only part of the problem. Once the houses started going up west of here, along Lake Okeechobee, everybody started worryin’ about floods after heavy rains. So the Army Corps of Engineers got this brilliant idea to dump the runoff into our rivers. If I had a couple of minutes alone with one of those guys I’d—” He laughed.
“You’d what?” I asked.
“Oh nothin’. I’m a talker, not a doer,” he conceded. “Jeremy’s the doer in the family. ’Course, sometimes he goes overboard. Gets himself into trouble. ’Specially lately.”
“Lately?” I asked with interest. “Has he been acting differently? Getting himself into more trouble than usual?” Now that he’s been taken over by the devil?
“Well, let’s just say he’s been involved in things he won’t tell me about.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and I’m worried about him. Patty’s not here to worry, so it’s up to me now.”